Cry, The Beloved Country

Cry, The Beloved Country Review

By Christopher Null

We had an execution, jilted lovers, big-time payback, and at least three sprawling examinations of someone's life. Now we get an apartheid film: another in the string of "serious movies" coming out in the last few weeks.

Cry, the Beloved Country is James Earl Jones's magnum opus, a film in which he gets to really stretch his range as an actor, even though the film doesn't give him much room to do so. The movie is the story of aging Zulu priest Stephen Kumalo (Jones) and his search for his sister and son in 1946 Johannesburg. A stranger in a strange land, Kumalo soon finds his country ways unsuited for life in the bustling city, and he is victimized by thieves almost as soon as he arrives.

Kumalo finds his sister soon enough: she's a prostitute in the seediest section of town. Finding son Absalom is a different matter altogether, and a convoluted investigation finally leads him to his son's life of crime, a pregnant girlfriend, and the sort-of-accidental murder of a prominent, white, social reformer. To make matters worse, this man is the son of Kumalo's wealthy neighbor, James Jarvis (Richard Harris). Kumalo becomes wrapped up in his son's trial, but more interestingly, attempts to reconcile things with Jarvis.

Harris and Jones are amazing when on screen together, but this is all too rare, as they interact in only three brief scenes. The rest of the picture is very beautiful, but its deliberate, plodding pace seems to drag the movie on for an eternity. There's no big surprise about what's going to happen, but the sheer heart that Jones, Harris, and director Darrell James Roodt have imbued to the film give it an uncommon bouyance and it manages to rise above its flawed pacing.

The message of Cry, the Beloved Country, that compassion and forgiveness are crucial if society is to develop to the next level, is almost completely foreign in cinema today. And it is that compassion that makes this picture so oddly memorable.